root/README

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
============================

This is the source tree for GHC, a compiler and interactive
environment for the Haskell functional programming language.

For more information, visit GHC's web site:

  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/

Information for developers of GHC can be found here:

  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/


Getting the Source
==================

There are two ways to get a source tree:

  1. Download source tarballs
  ---------------------------

  Download the GHC source distribution:

      ghc-<version>-src.tar.bz2

  which contains GHC itself and the "boot" libraries.

  2. Check out the source code from git
  -------------------------------------

  First get the GHC git repository:

    $ git clone http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc.git/

  Then run the sync-all script in that repository
  to get the other repositories:

     $ cd ghc
     $ ./sync-all get

  This checks out the "boot" packages.


Building & Installing
=====================

For full information on building GHC, see the GHC Building Guide [3].
Here follows a summary - if you get into trouble, the Building Guide
has all the answers.

Before building GHC you may need to install some other tools and
libraries.  See "Setting up your system for building GHC" [8].

NB. in particular you need GHC installed in order to build GHC,
because the compiler is itself written in Haskell.  For instructions
on how to port GHC to a new platform, see the Building Guide [3].

For building library documentation, you'll need Haddock [6].  To build
the compiler documentation, you need a good DocBook XML toolchain and
dblatex.

Quick start:  the following gives you a default build:

    $ perl boot
    $ ./configure
    $ make
    $ make install

The "perl boot" step is only necessary if this is a tree checked out
from git.  For source distributions downloaded from GHC's web site,
this step has already been performed.

These steps give you the default build, which includes everything
optimised and built in various ways (eg. profiling libs are built).
It can take a long time.  To customise the build, see the file HACKING.

Once you have a build you need to keep it going.  You need to keep all
repos in sync with the sync-all script [7].  To get the latest changes:

    $ ./sync-all pull
    $ ./sync-all get


References
==========

 [1] http://www.haskell.org/ghc/                        GHC Home Page
 [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc                GHC Developer's Wiki
 [3] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building  Building Guide
 [4] http://www.haskell.org/happy/                      Happy
 [5] http://www.haskell.org/alex/                       Alex
 [6] http://www.haskell.org/haddock/                    Haddock
 [7] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/SyncAll
 [8] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Preparation


Contributors
============

Please see

   http://www.haskell.org/ghc/contributors.html